


rip the stars to shreds

by lieyuu



Category: Dream SMP (Video Blogging RPF), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, GeorgeNotFound-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Hopeful Ending, Implied Relationships, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Relationship(s), Relationship Study, Screenplay/Script Format, and nothing consequential, but only bc im gonna randomly remember a tag and then add it, lmao all my tags arel ike "yes but", of a sort, only a little bit tho, partially, you'll see idk how to explain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 23:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30063168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieyuu/pseuds/lieyuu
Summary: Dream (tone tag)I know when I'm not wanted.George(tba.)The leaving is easy. It’s everything after that hurts.or; George leaves L'Manberg, and Dream.
Relationships: Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF), GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 75





	rip the stars to shreds

**Author's Note:**

> title from penelope scott's "feel better", which i looped while writing most of this
> 
> beta-ed by the lovely [elle](https://twitter.com/ERR0RGEO) [err0rgeo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/downthedarkpath) tysm elle ily mwah /p 
> 
> dsmp-fic! rec as you please <3

**DREAM (tone tag)**

I know when I’m not wanted.

**GEORGE**

(tba.)

-

The leaving is easy. It’s everything after that hurts.

There’s no real debate to it. George isn’t a particularly decisive person, which maybe, paradoxically, lends itself to the decision; he leaves. To stay is to watch his friends be torn apart - to stay is to watch the world burn and be forced to try and put it out with hands dripping with gasoline. 

He leaves in the dead of night, with an array of tools and armor and food. The weight of L’Manberg sheds itself with every new step he takes, and it’s like fresh air after being buried alive. No decision has ever been easier, he decides.

George passes a ravine with light emitting from it sometime between two and three AM; he contemplates turning back for a moment, doing his friends this one last favor. Tell them where their enemies are. But, then again, Wilbur was his friend too. Tommy was his friend too. He and Techno didn’t know each other, but he’d respected the warrior. 

Staying quiet is like leaving. He doesn’t tell Wilbur and Tommy of any plans, his or Schlatt’s. He doesn’t tell Schlatt where anyone is, Wilbur and Tommy or himself. He doesn’t tell Dream anything, either. If he is as powerful as he seems to believe, he can figure it out himself.

-

**DREAM (accepting)**

I know when I’m not wanted.

**GEORGE**

(tba.)

-

It’s late enough when George arrives at his destination that they will know he’s gone, and they might’ve even begun searching. They shouldn’t, and they know it, so they’ll search half-heartedly for maybe an hour before shrugging their shoulders and saying, “We did our best.”

One person will continue to search for him. One person would go to the ends of the earth to find him - beyond that, even. George has seen this person in action. But he knows, too, that the person knows better than to look for someone who doesn’t want to be found. 

George climbs a tree and perches atop the leaves, crosses from branch to branch with his arms outspread like on a balance beam. When he steps onto the mushroom cap, it’s spongey and sinks shallowly beneath his weight. He kneels in the middle and sets his things down, lifts his face towards the sun. It’s warm.

He can hear a bird chirping somewhere, and water running in the distance. When he opens his eyes, he thinks he can see the outline of a woodland mansion somewhere beyond the treeline. 

George lies down, curls around his backpack like it’s a functional substitute for who he used to do this with, like the tools and memories and remains of an old future stored within can build him a new one. 

The sun is warm. He closes his eyes and pretends it’s familiar.

-

**DREAM (resigned)**

I know when I’m not wanted.

**GEORGE**

(tba.)

_-_

Sapnap finds him, in the end. Or, more accurately, Sapnap finds him and they both pretend he hasn’t. Three weeks after he built a home in the trees and on the ground, two after he conquered the mansion and found absolutely nothing of worth within. 

“Let me guess,” George says, eyebrow raised and lips quirked in amusement. He gestures vaguely at the entrance of the mansion and shifts against the tree he’s leaning on, then drops his arm to rest on his knee. “Nothing of worth in there?”

Sapnap pauses from where he was kicking the dirt and looks up, expression guarded. “No,” he grumbles after a moment, pulling an apple out of his pocket and taking a bite. He pokes at a small scratch on his arm curiously and then saunters towards George, looking all too pleased with himself for someone who had supposedly found nothing. “Would’ve been nice to know that before I waste my time and torches on it.”

“I bet,” George agrees, and he looks at Sapnap and Sapnap looks at him and neither of them say anything at all.

They’re quiet for a long time, long enough for Sapnap to finish his apple and drop onto the ground next to George. He puts his weight against the tree, and the space between them is small enough to suffocate in - George wonders, almost longingly, if there’s warmth to be found there.

“I won’t tell him if you don’t want me to,” Sapnap finally says. His tone is still carefully emotionless, and his eyes are staring off into nothing when George glances over. “I mean, I get it, you know. It can be a lot. I wouldn’t want him finding me and bringing all that drama either.”

 _You don’t get it,_ George wants to say, wants to scream it from the treetops and grab Sapnap by the shoulders and shake him until he does. But he doesn’t; of course he doesn’t. He couldn’t, and George loves him for it.

“Thank you,” he says instead, quietly. “He wants to know?”

Sapnap hesitates. George looks over at him and stares at him meaningfully until he looks up, rolls his eyes and huffs shortly. “He wants to know,” he confirms, then adds, “I mean, he didn’t say it like that. But, you know. He’s an open book.”

“I know,” George says, and feels the weight of it and this bond between them like a manacle. 

He feels Sapnap glance over at him and stubbornly refuses to look back; Sapnap eventually looks away and shakes his head. “Don’t be like that,” he says. “You know why he didn’t come himself. Hell, he probably would’ve gotten here a lot faster. I’m flattered you all have so much faith in my tracking abilities, but I’m on the team for my combat and we all know it.”

“You’re on the team because we love you,” George says amicably, off-handedly - he doesn’t miss Sapnap’s sharp intake of breath, and doesn’t bother thinking on it more. His world has turned on its head, in recent days - he questions everything. This is something he doesn’t want to question.

“You know, Sapnap,” George adds as they stand at the edge of the dark oak forest, as he prepares to see him off. Sapnap pauses in adjusting the straps of his bag and looks over at him; George, for a moment, can look past new scars and deep bags under eyes, sees fifteen-year-old Sapnap and himself and a green figure beside them like it’s the dawning of a new day. “You’re welcome back whenever.”

Sapnap grins, and salutes him. “Hell yeah,” he says, and then he leaves.

Everyone leaves, all the time. The stories like to make it seem so difficult, but if life has taught George anything, leaving is easy. It’s so easy, it’s like breathing. Staying must be the thing that suffocates.

-

**DREAM (worried)**

I know when I’m not wanted. 

**GEORGE**

(tba.)

-

Over time, other people find him. Sam, Puffy, Punz. George doesn’t miss that these are all people who have close ties to Dream, whether it be business or friendship. He wonders if it’s a coincidence, then wonders if there are still coincidences with Dream. 

There are others, of course - Foolish, which is nice, and Technoblade, some-fucking-how - but none of them stay long. Sapnap is the only one who comes for more than an hour or two at a time, and Sapnap is the only one who comes regularly.

“He made you king, by the way,” Sapnap adds on one of these visits, like it’s something completely normal. George scoffs, then realizes he’s serious.

“He doesn’t even know where I am,” he says, and Sapnap shrugs and pulls out a handful of grass.

“No one else knows that,” he says, and he drops the grass on George’s knee, and that’s all they say about it.

(George does go back though, just briefly. Callahan greets him with silent excitement and they build a house together, and George has to laugh when he slots the mushroom pieces into place. Home away from home. It’s funny, he’d been thinking of the forest as that. It seems more fitting a title for this place, then.

He sees Dream at the edges of his vision like a mirage, feels him at his back like sunlight. They don’t speak.

George leaves, finds out the house has been burnt down a week later, and rolls his eyes and goes on his way. It’s the nature of the world. Things break and burn, people change and leave. He shouldn’t have expected any better.)

In the lands of the SMP, everywhere George turned was a mark of him and Dream and their friendship. Everywhere he went, there was a protective presence at his side. There is none of that in the forest; he feels almost bare without it. He looks around and sees himself reflected in everything.

George has never had any particularly strong feelings about this face of his. He thinks he might hate it now. Or he might love it. It might be a double-edged sword, or a needle hidden in bread, or a million other little metaphors that serve nothing but to define his loneliness with poetry. 

He might hate it now. Or he might love it. He isn’t decisive, and he’s never had any particularly strong feelings about his loneliness.

-

**DREAM (angry)**

I know when I’m not wanted.

**GEORGE**

(tba.)

_-_

Sapnap says, “Dream is in prison,” and George sits and tries to categorize how that makes him feel. Dream is longing and heartache and self-sacrifice; prison is a foreign concept, the worst of which he’s seen being their joke prison where they used to play at justice. Sapnap has told him about the new prison, Sam’s prison - Pandora’s Box - but it’s hard to imagine it in all its supposed terrible glory. 

“Is he allowed visitors?” George asks, carefully - he kicks Sapnap’s bag aside and lies down, and the look on his friend’s face is all he needs to see to know the answer.

“In a few days,” Sapnap says, hesitant, mouth twisted like he’s not sure what to do with it. “I don’t… I don’t think you should go..”

George snorts, and steals an apple out of Sapnap’s bag. “Just like Dream shouldn’t have exiled Tommy,” he says, and Sapnap rolls his eyes, and that’s that.

It’s a long and complex path into the cell; Sam leads him through it with all the humor of a man who’s been dead twenty centuries. Standing outside the room of lava, George turns to him and asks, “Am I still king, by the way?”

Sam’s face is impossible to see behind the mask, but George jokes to himself that he can see the shocked look anyway. “No,” Sam responds, voice impassive as his hidden face, “I believe Eret is.”

George nods. “Thank you.”

The lava rises. He speaks to Dream like it were from the pages of a storybook.

He leaves a quiet Dream, who smiles sharply into the water in his cell like he’s confronting an enemy. He leaves with the sense that nothing has changed, but maybe it has begun to.

-

**DREAM (himself)**

I know when I’m not wanted.

**GEORGE**

And yet you never know when you are. 

_-_

You don’t get it, _George wants to say, wants to scream it from the treetops and grab Sapnap by the shoulders and shake him until he does. But he doesn’t; of course he doesn’t. He couldn’t, and George loves him for it._

You don’t get it. I want him to find me; I have never wanted anything more. I have lived a life of loneliness and fading into the shadows and staying on the sidelines, and he makes me feel like the sun. But the thing is that I learned as a child that the sun is a star and I learned as a teenager that stars die and burn out and I learned as an adult that you don’t have to be a star to go supernova.

He lost me, but he lost himself first. Leaving is easy, it’s staying that suffocates. He suffocated. He suffocated himself, and someone I don’t recognize has returned in his place, except that I know it’s still him. It’s a version of him I don’t like to see and I know you don’t like to see it either and in the spirit of complete transparency between us, I don’t think he likes to see it either. We are stuck in this cycle of loving each other and hating each other and we apply it to ourselves too. It’s unhealthy. How are we meant to survive this?

I left. I’m doing my part. I think the cancer might still get us, but maybe we at least slowed it down. I don’t know. I don’t know anything except how to say things that sound like they might mean something if you had the time or patience to analyze it, but then you might find that they mean nothing at all. 

I’m just as lost as he is. Neither of us are looking for ourselves, though, and that’s the damning part. I want him to find me, but I know he won’t. He won’t until he finds himself and I don’t know when or if that’ll be. 

I’m sorry we’ve done this. I love you. You don’t understand and I am so glad you don’t, there is not a single world in which I think I could take it if you disappeared too. You always were the strongest of us. 

_“Thank you,” he says instead, quietly. “He wants to know?”_

_-_

_A boy in a blue shirt and dyed leather cap stands alone at the edge of a dark oak forest. He holds a piece of paper in his left hand and a poppy in the other. His expression is flat and emotionless._

_The light changes. Time has passed._

_A horse whinnies softly. The boy smiles at something beyond the camera._

**GEORGE (softly)**

It’s now.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! comments + kudos much appreciated; i can't promise i'll respond to all (or any) comments, but please know that i read and appreciate all of them so much :')


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